The sadism of anti-trafficking and the erasure of racial slavery

This debate has failed to engage with the enduring structure of racial slavery. As representations of African migrants in the Mediterranean illustrate, anti-trafficking campaigns feed into the problem they aim to dismantle.

The editors of Beyond Trafficking
and Slavery have convened a provocative debate on the question of human
trafficking awareness campaigns. We are especially heartened by the
commentators responding ‘no’. While some valuable points have been raised, there
nonetheless remains a critical yet neglected problem of representation at work
here. To date, none of the commentators have addressed the enduring structure
of racial slavery. It is impossible
for any anti-trafficking campaign to effectively address the problem of human
suffering while it remains unaware of how it is haunted by the spectre of Africans
in the ship’s hold and how it continues to parasitically feed off of the
history and legacies of racial slavery.

As we have asserted
previously (i.e., here
and here)
the modern world has been an ongoing
crisis for black people. Contemporary anti-slavery politics, much like
abolitionism of yesteryear, draws ethical sustenance from objectified black bodies for
non-black ones, all the while consistently displaying a failure of solidarity with actual black people and their
liberation struggles.

It is impossible
for any anti-trafficking campaign to effectively address the problem of human
suffering while it remains unaware of how it is haunted by the spectre of
Africans in the ship’s hold.

This fundamental problem only seems
to grow as visual representations of African migrants in the Mediterranean
basin expand in recent years. Two notable additions include the Italian
dramatic film Terraferma (2011) and
the documentary Fuocoammare/Fire at Sea
(2016), a 2017 Academy Award nominee.

Fuocoammare’s
non-fiction narrative closely tracks the fictional one in Terraferma. The plight of African migrants attempting to cross the
Mediterranean is contrasted with the daily life of Italian fishing villagers
whose intergenerational repose with the sea is rudely interrupted by desperate,
drowning, and dangerous black people. This narrative centres the plight of
Italian youth who are symbolically lost at sea as the waning fishing lifestyle
of their island is dramatically overturned by black bodies adrift in their
world.

Grand Canal, Venice. Kent Clark/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In Terraferma, a young man’s efforts to woo a woman from Milan vacationing
on the island are thwarted when he repels African migrants who appear out of
the dark sea from nowhere. The migrants are desperate to board his boat, but
the young man leaves them to drown. After the migrants’ dead bodies wash ashore
the next day, the young man finds the conviction to smuggle three Africans to
the Italian mainland. In doing so, he rescues his own injured manhood from his
sexual frustrations and from the economic dead-end facing him on the island
(which are, in fact, one and the same).

Beyond the narrative structure that
it shares with Terraferma, Fuocoammare is notable for its use of
captured video footage in which the camera’s languid lens betrays the pleasures
of the horrific images depicted. In the last quarter of the film, the camera
lingers on the deck of a coastguard cutter and in the hold of a migrant ship,
graphically depicting piles of deceased African migrants, as if the severely
burned, starved, and dehydrated bodies; intake centres; and modern-day
baracoons (detention centres) featured earlier in the film were not gratuitous
enough.

The images of black death in Fuocoammare are uninhibited and directly
connected to the representational sound of death. The resident wails, gasps,
and deadening silence fill the auditory frame of the film, forcing the viewer
to scrutinise the images to verify whether the subjects are alive, dying, or
already dead.

At one point in the film, for
instance, the camera turns to an African woman, whose naked body fills the
entire screen. Her black skin serves as a screen for projecting black death – the
very thing that organises the modern world. Dead or dying objects set the tone
for both films, deploying fungible blackness to animate the ethical dilemmas
faced by Italians: that is, the African migrant crisis is a crisis of civilisation
for Europeans.

Dead or dying
objects set the tone for both films, deploying fungible blackness to animate
the ethical dilemmas faced by Italians: that is, the African migrant crisis is
a crisis of civilization for Europeans.

These images force us to recall the
lurid history of lynching photography. The historical analogy between the
visual images of anti-trafficking campaigns and the recorded spectacles of
lynching do not obtain on the basis of intentionality – the lynching
photographer was a triumphant participant, whereas the anti-trafficking
filmmaker is supposedly a concerned observer.

Both intentions, however, are
expressions of a general culture of sadism in which black people are positioned
as both victims and spectators of their own violation. To borrow from David
Marriott’s analysis
of lynching photography, can any black person resist the implicit
identification with the dead, drowning, abject black body, written into an
image which reproduces the fundamental divisions of human and sub-human life by
showing white men rescuing (policing)?

We mentioned ‘piles’ of Africans
earlier, for indeed that is the implication of these images of
anti-trafficking: black people as inanimate objects to be collected, refused,
and returned from whence they came, back into the sea. Black death is no loss
because black life is no life at all; one’s life must have meaning as such in
order for one’s death to matter. These films illuminate that, while the
movement of Africans across the Mediterranean in the present period does not
occur under the same conditions of chattel captivity as it did from the eighth through
the nineteenth centuries, Africans are indeed migrating today under terms of a
re-elaborated captivity.

On the empirical level, there is the
physical and sexual violence, the various states of confinement endured along
the journey, and the exploitation by traffickers – not to mention the fact that
the contemporary conditions in Africa that lead to migration are themselves the
product of the forced removal of millions of black people from the continent
during the slave trade.

Black death is no
loss because black life is no life at all; one’s life must have meaning as such
in order for one’s death to matter.

The black struggle for
self-determination (of which contemporary migration is a feature), moreover, encounters
a level of suffering beyond what the empirical can acknowledge. After a
millennium of racial slavery, bondage has become synonymous with blackness, and
today, non-black humanity remains tied to anti-black violence and to the denouncements of it. In other
words, African migrants are captive to blackness’ objectified and dehumanised status
that guides depictions of black suffering and any interventions marshalled
against it. It is a deathly way of being alive, to exist in the collective
conscious as sub-human no matter what you are doing or what has been done to
you.

As a result, black people are
categorically precluded from being victims of anything, including trafficking. At
best, black migration registers only as a refugee crisis – people out-of-place
– and not as part of the trafficking problem. An interesting state of affairs,
by the way, given that it was the legal traffic in black bodies that underwrote
the formation of the modern world and continues to undergird every human
conflict on the planet to this day.

Humanitarianism, whether for
refugees or trafficked persons, thus remains one means by which black victimhood
is refused and black self-determination foreclosed. For confirmation of our
argument here against these anti-black images we need only consider the recent
mobile phone video of a migrant from the Gambia drowning in Venice’s Grand
Canal. The video footage shows a black man drowning and calling for help in the
canal only a few yards from a boat full of tourists. Rather than save the man’s
life, observers instead made keepsakes of his death on their mobile phones,
documenting as well the numerous racist sexual epithets rained down on him in a
cathartic
act of initiation and absolution (in Marriott's words), as with the lynch mob’s consumption of black flesh.

In a sadistic twist on Frantz
Fanon’s insight in Wretched of the Earth that
the final stage of genocide looks a lot like suicide, news reports of the
incident in the Grand Canal speculated that the man in fact did not want to be
saved. The discourse on anti-trafficking or about refugees on the threshold of
the West displace from view the centrality of blackness and its abject,
fungible, and structurally vulnerable status from the basic foundation of
modern society.

About the authors

Tryon P. Woods teaches Crime & Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts,
Dartmouth, Africana Studies at Brown University, and Black Studies at
Providence College. His research
addresses the sexual violence of antiblackness, both within U.S. politics and
legal discourse, and within the leading discourses on globalization and
post-colonialism in Africa.

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Beyond Trafficking and Slavery seeks to help those trying to understand forced labour, trafficking and slavery by combining the rigour of academic scholarship with the clarity of journalism. Our goal is to use evidence-based advocacy to unveil the structural political, economic, and social root causes of global exploitation.

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